The
call for a homeland has become not only natutal
and necessary but urgent as well. The community
has arrived at a water- shed in history. It is now
or never that it has to fling the cloak of
minority complex under which it fossilized itself
into inaction through the centuries. It cannot
afford to reverse the facts of history, the fact
of total Islamization of Kashmir. It cannot de-
communalize the socio-political milieu of the
valley in which it has not heen allowed to sustain
and survive. It cannot afford to relinquish its
claim in the State of Jammu and Kashmir and get
dispersed and lost in the teeming population of
the countty, so it has to seek the Homeland and
seek it now.

In
the present state of exile, the whole community is
going through indescribable psychological, mental
and physical anguish. The older generation is fast
fading away as they are going through the throes
of disease and death which has come prematurely
for thousands. The middle generation is withering
and aging rapidly because of idleness, denial and
deprivation. The younger genetation has hecome
apathetic, depressed and frustrated because of
denial of opportunities for living, denial of
admissions into institutions of learning and the
apartheid that they face from all quarters. The
new generation that takes birth in exile grows up
in the most uncongenial and hostile environment.
At this rate the cornmunity will not take long to
dissipate. With the passage of each day, the
community gets impoverished on all fronts and is
moving towards extinction. That is why Homeland is
most urgent, now.

We
have to remind ourselves that only a Homeland can
guarantee us the identity that we are seeking. It
is a quirk of history that a great and large
nation that is India with eighty percent Hindu
population, has no qualms of conscience in keeping
silent about Hindus becoming refugees in their own
land. This can only happen in India. Only in India
does a whole nation accept with impunity the
banishment of a small minority from its natural
habitat because it happens to be a Hindu minority
of a Muslim majority State which is at the mercy
of fundamentalists and rank communalists. The
Homeland therefore becomes imperative and urgent
before more damage is sustained by the community,
before the community gets further fragmented,
dispersed and disintegrated.

The
Homeland is urgcnt because granting it will set in
motion the process of normalization in the State.
The first duty of the nation is to resettle the
uprooted citizens in their natural habitat. The
Government of India has been vaccilating in its
policies and priorities in Kashmir. Infact it has
no definite policy except one of drift and despair
on the one hand and appeasement of the Muslim
majority on the other. The most terrible fall out
of this policy has been the genocide of the Hindu
minority in the valley. If the Central Government
realises this fact, it will have taken the first
right step towards Kashmir. If it realises that it
has to protect the legitimate interests and rights
of its patriotic citizens who have been fighting
for India in Kashmir, it will be the second step
and in the third big leap it has to grant a
Homeland to this community.